Though The Amateur is a new movie, and a fairly entertaining one, in many ways it feels like a missive from a lost era. A brilliant but low-level encryption employee at the CIA, played by Rami Malek, discovers that a group of rogue operators have tried to cover up a drone strike that killed American allies, blaming the attack on insurgents. When he confronts them with this knowledge, threatening to leak it to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN, they seem genuinely nervous—as if any of those august news institutions still had the power to shock the average U.S. citizen, or even most of the country’s elected officials, with a revelation about arrogant government bigwigs violating protocol. If you’re looking for a work of fantasy to make you feel wistful about the old world order—one in which whistleblowers could blow a whistle and people would actually hear it—The Amateur is the movie for you.
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But we can still dream, can’t we? In the 1990s and early 2000s, a thriller like The Amateur would hit theaters every few weeks. These pictures didn’t have to be earth-shatteringly good; if they provided a few hours of moderate pleasure on a weekend evening, that was enough. Similarly, The Amateur is pleasantly average, a semi-preposterous thriller that’s also transportive—parts of it were filmed in France, England, and Turkey, and by the end, you feel you’ve at least gotten a movie’s-eye view of those places. If The Amateur is unremarkable, it’s also efficient and effective, and sometimes all you need is a movie that gets the job done.
Malek’s Charlie Heller is mindful and methodical in everything he does. When he makes a cup of coffee for his wife Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan), who’s about to head off to London for a short business trip, he measures the grains so precisely you can almost smell their earthy, cock-a-doodle-doo briskness. Then he heads to work; the couple live somewhere in the country, which seems about a thousand breaths of fresh air away from Langley. Once Charlie arrives there, we get some sense of his place in the pecking order. A hotshot agent known as the Bear (Jon Bernthal) asks him if he’s free for lunch. Charlie is awkwardly pleased by the invitation, until he realizes that the Bear only wants him to fix a computer problem. He’s OK with it all, though: he toils away alongside a bunch of other similarly brilliant and equally underappreciated nerds, and that’s just the way it is.
Yet there is something that sets Charlie apart: he maintains contact with a mysterious entity he knows only as Inquiline. He has no idea where Inquiline is located, and Inquiline isn’t telling. But this secret contact entrusts him with sensitive information that will prove useful when tragedy strikes, just hours after Charlie has kissed his wife goodbye. Not long after her arrival in London, she’s seized and killed in a terrorist attack, and Charlie’s crusty, shifty-eyed supervisor, Moore (Holt McCallany), breaks the bad news to him, even showing him a video of the event. Charlie can think of nothing but taking revenge on his wife’s killers; Moore tries to get him to stand down. But Inquiline has given Charlie some damning information about Moore’s involvement in those drone strikes, which Charlie uses to blackmail his boss. Moore agrees to send Charlie to CIA agent training school—his teacher will be Laurence Fishburne’s strict, flinty Henderson, who bluntly tells his pupil he lacks the killer instinct. No matter. Charlie won’t give up, and he proceeds to chase the bad-news weapons dealers responsible for his wife’s murder from Paris to Marseille, later trekking to Istanbul and the Baltic Coast. On the fly, this mild-mannered, excessively nervous analyst becomes an action hero.
Crazily, Malek makes it all believable. The Amateur was directed by James Hawes (who has worked on TV’s Slow Horses and Black Mirror) and adapted from Robert Littell’s 1981 espionage novel of the same name; it’s constructed with a breezy sense of confidence. Malek’s Charlie is a babe in the wood when it comes to tracking down ruthless international bad guys, but his chutzpah counts for something. Plus, he knows where to get basic information: we watch in real time as he figures out how to bust into an old-school Parisian apartment with the help of an instructional YouTube video. (He jiggles the lock with one hand and holds his phone in the other as the expert in question—“Hey there, lock-pick fans!”—cheerfully passes his expertise along.)
Malek is good at playing characters who are a little—or even very—out of step with the world. There’s something immensely trusting about him, with his heart-shaped face, pointed pixie ears, and perpetually haunted eyes. It’s easy to buy him as a dutiful public servant who feels shocked and betrayed by the world’s random cruelty. But he’s a naif with nerve. When he finds out one of the terrorists he’s targeting suffers from serious allergies, he figures out a devious way to clog her breathing passages with pollen. He knows enough about physics to bring a swanky glass swimming pool, suspended 60 stories in the air, crashing to the ground. As vigilantes go, he’s an endearing one. And he makes a mean cup of coffee to boot.